Panoramic stitching is a process that aligns and stitches together images having partially overlapping regions of the same scene which are taken by one or more cameras to obtain a single panoramic view of the scene. When multiple cameras are used, the cameras are typically positioned at different viewing angles at a center of the scene and carefully calibrated so as to provide overlaps between the different views of the scene.
In the case of movies/videos, the calibration parameters used with the camera set-up when the images were initially taken are later employed to stitch together the multiple movies/videos to produce a panoramic movie/video or to align the images when projecting them on a wide screen to reproduce the panoramic scene. Unfortunately, however, there are typically slight inaccuracies in the calibration parameters of the multiple cameras. For example, in the case of Cinerama (widescreen) movies, camera calibration may be off by as much as two percent of the film width. Such calibration errors, though seemingly slight, result in visual artifacts in the displayed panoramic images.
It would be desirable to be able to more accurately align multiple images to reduce visual artifacts in panoramic images, movies, and videos.